Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Tools to help define the scenarios and workflows can be simple. Data flow or process flow diagrams will help identify some of the common scenarios. These scenarios can help you think through a complex problem if you take the time. Consider the users and their motivation.

Lisa’s Story

Our team planned to rewrite the core functionality of the application that processes the daily buys and sells of mutual funds. These trades are the result of retirement plan participants making contributions, exchanging balances from one fund to another, or withdrawing money from their accounts. Lisa’s coworker, Mike Thomas, studied the existing trade processing flow and diagrammed it so that the team could understand it well before trying to rewrite the code. Figure 10-2 shows a portion of the flow diagram. WT stands for the custodian who does the actual trading. Three different file types are downloaded and translated into readable format: CFM, PRI, and POS. Each of these files feeds into a different part of the application to perform processing and produce various outputs: settled trades, a ticker exception report, and a fund position report.

—Lisa

Figure 10-2 Sample portion of a process flow diagram

When testing end-to-end, make spot checks to make sure the data, status flags, calculations, and so on are behaving as expected. Use flow diagrams and other visual aids to help you understand the functionality. Many organizations depend on reports to make decisions, and those reports seem to be the last thing we verify. If your scenarios have been identified correctly, you might be able to use your application reports to provide a final check.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing (ET) is an important approach to testing in the agile world. As an investigative tool, it’s a critical supplement to the story tests and our automated regression suite. It is a sophisticated, thoughtful approach to testing without a script, and it enables you to go beyond the obvious variations that have already been tested. Exploratory testing combines learning, test design, and test execution into one test approach. We apply heuristics and techniques in a disciplined way so that the “doing” reveals more implications that just thinking about a problem. As you test, you learn more about the system under test and can use that information to help design new tests.

Exploratory testing is not a means of evaluating the software through exhaustive testing. It is meant to add another dimension to your testing. You do just enough to see if the “done” stories are really done to your satisfaction.

The bibliography lists more resources you should investigate to learn more about exploratory testing.

A valuable side effect of exploratory testing is the learning that comes out of it. It reveals areas of the product that could use more automated tests and brings up ideas for new or modified features that lead to new stories.

See the bibliography for some links to more about Rapid Software Testing.

Exploratory Testing Explained

Michael Bolton is a trainer and consultant in rapid and exploratory testing approaches. He teaches a course called Rapid Software Testing, which he co-writes with senior author James Bach. Here’s Michael’s definition of exploratory testing.

Cem Kaner didn’t invent exploratory testing, but he identified and named it in 1983, in the first edition of Testing Computer Software, as an approach all testers use when their brains are engaged in their work. He and James Bach, the other leading advocate of the approach, have long defined exploratory testing as “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning.” Kaner also defines exploratory testing more explicitly as “a style of testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the value of her work by treating learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as activities that continue in parallel throughout the project.” That’s quite a mouthful. What does it mean?